Friday, January 06, 2006

The Ballad of Finis Shelnutt

They don't believe in mercyJudgment on them is something that you'll never see - Bob Dylan

There are so many bad guys, it's good when they have easy names to remember.

Finis Shelnutt, for instance. Daniel Hopsicker is due much credit for first lifting this peculiar corner of American gothic and noting what crawled out. (Also, thanks to this thread on the RI discussion board for adding to the story.)

Shelnutt came to Hopsicker's attention when he popped up last weekend in a Katrina feature on Chris Matthew's Hardball year-end review. Coincidentally - hey, it happens - Shelnutt was also a principal source of the rumours of looters shooting police.

O'REILLY: And on the phone from the French Quarter, 53-year-old businessman Finis Shelnutt, who's surrounded by looters....

You're on St. Louis Street. That's high ground in the French Quarter. No water in the street. But what's the looter factor there? How many of them are there and what are they doing?

SHELNUTT: Bill, it started off I guess the night after the hurricane the looting started. And the police were chasing looters a block away from me. And a couple of looters stopped and shot a policeman in the head - in the forehead and killed him.

Shelnutt continues, describing how he was trapped by the "human volcano" of looters, until a sympathetic O'Reilly says "we're going to get you help." Hopsicker found Shelnutt to be the source for at least two reports on FoxNews which spread the poisoning meme that looters were menacing citizens in zombie-like packs and shooting police.

Shelnutt seemed to turn up a lot post-Katrina. Here he is mixing a pot of jambalaya on the street September 25 in front of his Alex Patout's Louisian Restaurant. And five days earlier - not even three weeks after his Fox interview - there's this from Der Spiegel:

New Orleans - Finis Shellnut is wealthy and he isn't hiding it, even in the difficult times following the Katrina disaster. The 53-year-old real estate magnate sits in front of one of his buildings in the French Quarter, enjoying a chilled bottle of French champagne.

The man is a walking glitz machine, from the diamonds on his Rolex to his gold-framed glasses to the silver cross dangling on his chest under his half-open shirt. Shellnut is doing well these days, extremely well. He senses a lot of post-Katrina business coming his way. "Our party's about to get going again," he says. He sits next to a flyer depicting his face and advertising his phone number. "The storm destroyed a great deal," he says, adding, with a smile, "and there's plenty of space to build houses and sell them for a lot of money."

Shellnut wasn't particularly hard-hit by the storm and the flooding in New Orleans. "My real estate is in the city's better neighborhoods," he says, clearly pleased with himself, "a tree fell down here and there, but otherwise everything's just fine."

...

Despite all the chaos and destruction, the storm and the floods came with a silver lining for people like Shellnut. "Most importantly, the hurricane drove poor people and criminals out of the city," he says, "and we hope they don't come back."

Shellnut has even conjured up ancient Gallic legend to support his theory of Katrina's supposedly sanitizing effects. He says that the name "Katrina" once symbolized a kind of cleansing process that only leaves behind the purest elements of a society.

But that's not where we leave Finis Shelnutt. Hopsicker also recognized the name from Iran Contra drug smuggling and the Clinton's Arkansas Mafia. "His real claim on notoriety," writes Hopsicker, "came when he was identified as the man who picked up the duffel bags filled with cash dropped by CIA Drug Pilot Barry Seal at the Triple S Ranch near Hot Springs, Arkansas. An estimated $9 million per week fell out of the sky."

Terry Reed's Compromised, which details the bonds of crime and deep politics between the Bush family, the CIA and the Clintons, has much to say about Shelnutt. In the 1980s he was the son-in-law of Seth Ward, owner of the Triple S Ranch, which made him the brother-in-law of future number three man in the Justice Department Webster Hubbell. The connections didn't end there. Shelnutt was also employed by Clinton's close associate Dan Lasater, whose company was in direct receipt of drug "tithes" from Seal.

A particular passage in Compromised describes a conversation between Reed and Seal, in which Reed suggests Ward was threatening to blackmail the agency for what he knew of the drug operation. Seal was surprised; he'd thought the Triple S Ranch was Lasater's, and had no idea Shelnutt also worked as Ward's "go-fer," in Reed's words. Seal's reported as saying, "I know this guy, Finis. He works for Dan as a bond salesman. Now ain't that interestin'." When a man like Barry Seal can be taken aback by someone's deep political pedigree, that's very interesting. And he soon had hopes of exploiting it. Later in the book Seal tells Reed, "when ya told me that Finis Shelnutt was the guy at the ranch [where the "green flights" dropped their money in Arkansas] dollar signs started dancin' in my head. I saw an immediate way to get some white stuff up some noses around Bill Clinton real fast."

But that isn't where we leave Shelnutt, either. Because in 1990 Finis married Clinton's former mistress Gennifer Flowers. They lived for a while in Denver, where Shelnutt was described as a "stockbroker," before turning to restaurants and real estate in New Orleans. (Here's the website for "Gennifer Flowers Kelsto Club," situated "in the heart of the New Orleans French Quarter.")

So where do we leave Finis Shelnutt? The Iran Contra go-fer, the former brother-in-law of Webster Hubbell and bagman for Dan Lasater who was so well-connected even Barry Seal was impressed, turns up on FoxNews lying about looters shooting policemen in New Orleans, and days later appeals to mythology in Der Spiegel regarding how the city had been "cleansed" of its underclass. And where do people like Finis Shelnutt leave us?

I was going to say that if America didn't exist, someone would have to invent it. But you know what? Maybe that's precisely what happened.

Anonymous One,maybe Finis found the best vodoo mama in N.O.I wonder if he might have helped with the relocation of some of those missing kids down there?He might even be part of the bushclintonkatrina.org? This guy's name pops up with some connected folks from way back,later.

Whoa.This is why I am now hopelessly addicted to the study of what you've dubbed deep politics. I just read Compromised not to long ago and figured the book was closed on it. But connecting it to Katrina, I am impressed.

You should get an interview with this Finis Shellnutt. At least some recipies.Geez, wow.

I spent a lot of time with the Hubbell's in the 80's. I even went to the Redneck Riveria with them and Ward one summer (accidentally set a dune on fire on Independence Day). It's weird to see this and think back to that time and wonder what they knew. I've been following the Seal/Mena/CIA thing ever since.

A reality --The US congressman representing Mena became head of the DEA. He is now with Homeland Security. When Asa H. was going through hearings we contacted Sen. Leahey office, got relevant portions of Hopsicker's Barry and the boys in front of them. The comment ... "We don't care." Not it's a bunch of hooey, but that they weren't even interested.

The War on Drugs has nothing to do with our health, our children or our community. It is about keeping in place a black-market, which corrupts our society from the top on down and bottom on up, and supplies "slush funds" for nefarious dealings in our economic, political and social spheres.

Much of the control of our "society" lies with Honey Traps, Blackmail, Secret Societies and the promotion of inept/controlled individuals to powerful positions is rampant within our "power structure."

Finis Shelnutt is enjoying a beautiful September day. The sun is blazing hot, the sky perfectly clear, and he has a table with a tidy white tablecloth all to himself in front of Alex Patout's Louisiana Restaurant.

His moustache is perfectly trimmed. Not a hair is out of place. His collarless striped shirt hangs comfortably open at the neck. And he gazes serenely out at the world through tinted glasses.

Finis Shelnutt, who owns a building that houses the Alex Patout's restaurant in the French Quarter, watched [Bush's New Orlean's] speech on a small battery-powered television as he sat outside at a table with a white linen cloth, a bottle of Schramsberg champagne and a beer.

"This is a powerful speech," he said. "What I'm concerned about is that some of the programs he mentioned need to be monitored closely. New Orleans has a reputation for funding disappearing."

"The Quarter is going to be fine," Shelnutt says in a honeyed drawl. "The entire city is going to be a much better place. People have been living in poverty for generations. They don't know any better. They got into a rut, like a bad marriage, and needed to have a light shined on it. ... Truly, I think this is going to be a blessing for some of them."

"Katrina is the best thing to ever happen to this city," said 53-year-old Finis Shelnutt, who owns a French Quarter restaurant and now spends his day sitting alone at a table outside hoping to sell a cold beer or soda to journalists or rescue workers passing by.

Telling of the deep-rooted divide that exists between black and white and rich and poor in this Southern city, Shelnutt said the storm created an opportunity to clean up New Orleans, which is filled with "slums and too many bad areas."

He hopes the city builds a golf course or two where the poor neighborhoods, home to mostly black people, are still underwater.

"Change is good," Shelnutt said, denying it was a race issue. "They will find there is a better world elsewhere, like in Houston or Atlanta."

Arthur Gilroy: It's good to see you. I'm Gothamite from Daily Kos. I always looked forward to an AG post over there, and I've missed your quirky style. Of course this spot give me a full plate of quirkiness.

I check in on your website periodically. It is always interesting, although sometimes it strains my credulity.The Finis Shelnutt piece, however, is a jewel. I am convinced that the mere act of reading it could transport some more buttoned down people into a Lovecraftian spiral into ?

It is sad to loose New Orleans, one of America's truly original and individual cities which will inevitably be cleansed or purged and shapeshifted into a shoppingscape, with golf courses, casino's, and faux housing for the superrich. The old, spooky, seedy charm will be lost in the new development and polished ownership.

"Some day are real rain will come and wash all the scum of the earth."

Someone told me of a weird cloud formation they witnessed on their way to church. (Who btw is not into CT)

He said "it was huge, it looked like that building on the back of a dollar but without the roof"....it had 4 or 5 windows - perfect rectangles, spaced the same amount between each, blue sky in each window.

A completely innocuous article, typical of Time magazine's hagiographic approach to pillars of the American Establishment. It's a regular paean to bipartisan dialogue- unless you've taken the trouble to read Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA, by Terry Reed and John Cummings ( a very condensed summary of some of the same material is also found in Roger Morris's Partners In Power), whereupon the interview banter of the two power players assumes a cast that isn't nearly as wholesome as interviewer Michael Duffy's softball questioning presumes...

By the way, the quite densely written Compromised has a terrific section in the last part of the book on the treatment of Terry Reed's story by Time magazine, which mutated into a hit piece on Reed- perhaps the most widely circulated piece of popular print journalism on the Mena story at the time it first got national attention. A real look behind the scenes of how news stories get spun by big-league media, focussing especially in this case on the role of Associate Editor Richard Behar...highly recommended reading. That material alone makes Compromised well worth checking out, in my opinion.

The lure of lucre, though, accounts for some of the region's population surge, as outsiders rush in to make a fast buck. Wall Street bankers were ready to hop the next plane to Baton Rouge after a conference call last week with Louisiana Treasurer John Kennedy, who was soliciting financing to rebuild what the Feds won't cover. "We won't make money immediately," said one Wall Streeter. "But once this gets started, there could be tens of billions in financing." Florida developers are also flocking in to snap up the Big Easy's ravaged neighborhoods. New Orleans businessman Finis Shelnutt claims to have three Florida investors ready to plunk down hundreds of millions to "build French Quarter design high-rises that can take Cat 5 hurricanes."

Friends of Jeb & co.?

Nah. Couldn't be.

It's not like there was an election debacle there in recent memory that could have caused debts to be incurred......or......umm..... anything like that.

"He [Shelnutt] says that the name 'Katrina' once symbolized a kind of cleansing process that only leaves behind the purest elements of a society."

Katrina/catharsis: somehow I'd never made the etymological connection, though apparently it is, in fact, contested: http://tinyurl.com/dtt57

Whether the connection, such as it may or may not be, is purely coincidental, or whether--God help us--Katrina was called up by the powers that be to "cleanse" New Orleans, and was even somehow given by them, if so it was, an appropriate moniker . . .

In any event, it's endlessly amazing what keeps turning up here at RI, so much so than in a moment or two of absolute awe bordering on paranoia, I've wondered how Jeff Wells could possibly be just one person, and not an entire faculty of researchers and scholars and artists funded to the gills and exclusively employed 24/7 in producing this blog.

The fact that just one man does, to all appearances, accomplish so much should really be no wonder, however. When the time is right, the right man (OK, "person," if we absolutely must) emerges with a gift from God to do what is right, and do it well.

Strange world. I used to know Finis back in the late 60's when he was a karate instructor. Don't mess with him, he was pretty damn good. I even remember being surprised when he married Sally Ward some years later, I used to date Sally! But really, Finis is serious bad news.

In it you can see alternating "tuning fork" patterns of precipitation whose appearance coincides with a simultaneous change in the path of the hurricane either directly towards or repelled away from the anomaly.

Interesting how Wall St. is in the middle of a big gold rush to the Louisiana coast, isn't it?

Also interesting how they had private security goons take people's guns away, and flirted with martial law.

And let's not forget the poor souls trapped in the dome, living out a macabre nightmare at the hands of the authorities, and the many who were flown to unknown destinations only to find barbed-wire fence pointing in, men with guns, and instructions not to leave "the camp".

They're definitely trying to kill us, folks. From the chemtrailed skies through the flouridated city water to the GMO'd foods, they're trying to kill us. Kissinger wasn't kidding, apparently.

On the upshot, I think we're going to win this one. Not because we don't have any choice but to win, but because the evil bastards have no choice but to lose. Natural law should see to this, and many have found that making and distributing orgonite restores energetic balance in an area such that natural law is quickly restored and, put simply, bad people with no hearts are compelled to flee. Everybody who uses it seems to see this happen in their own lives, so I recommend it heartily.

It's a first step towards everything we are going to have to do to clean up this mess once the parasites are out of power on this planet.

While not aligning myself with Finis, he does have a point about the condition of NO before Katrina. The place was a stink hole and it was worth, literally, one's life if one dared ventured out of the Quarter. The crime and poverty there was appalling. Well, for that matter, it was worth one's life within the Quarter. Just take a look at the police reports or ask any one who lived there. Lots of murder and robbery of tourists.

Ever since the oil bust of the 80's, the job/money has not been there. There never has been any white collar industry so that just left shipping, tourism and a feeble attempt at making the city a convention center. However, as of last year, the real flavor of the city was already long gone and had been replaced with low-rent-newly-arrived immigrant shops selling junk from China with roving bands of black hustlers and robbers intermingling with trashy white "Girls Gone Wild" types. The real people of NO went elsewhere (not gonna say where) some years ago and took their unique culture with them. All that was left of NO was old buildings, ghosts, a dark Disneyesque tourist trade, and thousands of welfarites with no future.

If Katrina really was the result of weather control, and the goal really was to force "undesirables" to relocate, I can't help but reflect on the fact that the area being ethnically cleansed represents a de facto coastal bridge between Texas and Florida, both of which are conspiracy theory "ground zeros", and both of which have had the misfortune of being Bush family stomping grounds for the last half century?

another person with a strange and improbable bio, more in the style of osama than the character referred to in this article , is shamil basayev, one of the most well-known names from the chechnya war.

according to his wikipedia entry, he not only was pronounced dead six times, but managed to hijack a plane into turkey and get off scot-free, he organized the beslan massacre, and assumed govt functions in-between. read more about his heroic life at wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamil_Basayev

and lest we forget, while doing all of above and more, he managed to put in an appearance as mad scientist in the 1997 film "The Peacemaker". see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119874/

one day people will stop looking under the plastic rocks for mythological beasts and realise that the nazis won world war 2 - the name of the franchise just changed here and there, but in these times the confidence of the fascists is rising with the fear of the population.

why do you think Finis spoke of 'cleansing' to a german readership?

i could go on, and some may like more of a case made for this, but hell, its obvious to those with eyes.

to put it in context, its like how the great PK Dick wrote that the roman empire never ended - it just cloaked itself in new forms. same evil, new name.

Shelnutt fits right in with this post below. Read it. Shelnutt talking over champagne about his joy of a Nordic god Katrina killing and scattering black people, or Katrina as a valkerie based ethnic cleasing fits right in with Portland IMC's article on New Orleans's Mafia based ethnic cleansing during Katrina, real estate style:

Title: Pre-Katrina "urban renewal" buy-up of 25% New Orleans by alleged 9-11 mafia linksAuthor: development terrorism watchDate: 2005.09.14 11:39Description: This goes on about the tentative similar parallel to alleged gangster connected Hertz who just bought up 25% of New Orleans--and how he is allged to be connected to the Israeli and Colombian Drug Cartels. That goes well with the more well known Bush/Israeli/Lansky/Malnik/ mafia connections--only one remove from George H. W. Bush. It doesn't take a detective to note that if Hertz has alleged links to Israeli mafia and drug smuggling money laundering into real estate, and that the Bush ties into this very nexus of Israeli mafia are more well known, that the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina disaster may have been well planned out at least 26 months in advance, when Hertz began to buy up 25% of New Orleans. Is this a Bush redevelopment operation outsourced to Hertz? And if it is a PRELIMINARY buy-up, that makes the hurricane even more sinister if a HAARP attack was planned out with urban renewal in the same cold blooded breath. After all, Hurricane Katrina was heading directly across the Gulf of Mexico, until, screech, it makes a 90 right turn dead toward New Orleans when it gets directly south of it.

Hurricanes are notoriously lacking in lightning. Hurricanes blow, they rain, they flood, but seldom do they crackle. Surprise: During the record-setting hurricane season of 2005 three of the most powerful storms--Rita, Katrina, and Emily--did have lightning, lots of it. And researchers would like to know why.

The boom of thunder and crackle of lightning generally mean one thing: a storm is coming. Curiously, though, the biggest storms of all, hurricanes, are notoriously lacking in lightning. Hurricanes blow, they rain, they flood, but seldom do they crackle.

Surprise: During the record-setting hurricane season of 2005 three of the most powerful storms--Rita, Katrina, and Emily--did have lightning, lots of it. And researchers would like to know why.

Richard Blakeslee of the Global Hydrology and Climate Center (GHCC) in Huntsville, Alabama, was one of a team of scientists who explored Hurricane Emily using NASA's ER-2 aircraft, a research version of the famous U-2 spy plane. Flying high above the storm, they noted frequent lightning in the cylindrical wall of clouds surrounding the hurricane's eye. Both cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning were present, "a few flashes per minute," says Blakeslee.

"Generally there's not a lot of lightning in the eye-wall region," he says. "So when people see lightning there, they perk up -- they say, okay, something's happening."

Indeed, the electric fields above Emily were among the strongest ever measured by the aircraft’s sensors over any storm. "We observed steady fields in excess of 8 kilovolts per meter," says Blakeslee. "That is huge--comparable to the strongest fields we would expect to find over a large land-based 'mesoscale' thunderstorm."

The flight over Emily was part of a 30-day science data-gathering campaign in July 2005 organized and sponsored by NASA headquarters to improve scientists' understanding of hurricanes. Blakeslee and others from NASA, NOAA and 10 U.S. universities traveled to Costa Rica for the campaign, which is called "Tropical Cloud Systems and Processes." From the international airport near San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, they could fly the ER-2 to storms in both the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean. They combined ER-2 data with data from satellites and ground-based sensors to get a comprehensive view of each storm.

Rita and Katrina were not part of the campaign. Lightning in those storms was detected by means of long-distance sensors on the ground, not the ER-2, so less is known about their electric fields.

Nevertheless, it is possible to note some similarities: (1) all three storms were powerful: Emily was a Category 4 storm, Rita and Katrina were Category 5; (2) all three were over water when their lightning was detected; and (3) in each case, the lightning was located around the eye-wall.

What does it all mean? The answer could teach scientists something new about the inner workings of hurricanes.

Within thunderclouds, vertical winds cause ice crystals and water droplets (called "hydrometeors") to bump together. This "rubbing" causes the hydrometeors to become charged. Think of rubbing your socked feet across wool carpet--zap! It's the same principle. For reasons not fully understood, positive electric charge accumulates on smaller particles while negative charge clings to the larger ones. Winds and gravity separate the charged hydrometeors, producing an enormous electric field within the storm. This is the source of lightning.

A hurricane's winds are mostly horizontal, not vertical. So the vertical churning that leads to lightning doesn't normally happen.

Lightning has been seen in hurricanes before. During a field campaign in 1998 called CAMEX-3, scientists detected lightning in the eye of hurricane Georges as it plowed over the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The lightning probably was due to air forced upward -- called "orographic forcing" -- when the hurricane hit the mountains.

"Hurricanes are most likely to produce lightning when they're making landfall," says Blakeslee. But there were no mountains beneath the "electric hurricanes" of 2005—only flat water.

It's tempting to think that, because Emily, Rita and Katrina were all exceptionally powerful, their sheer violence somehow explains their lightning. But Blakeslee says that this explanation is too simple. "Other storms have been equally intense and did not produce much lightning," he says. "There must be something else at work."

It's too soon to say for certain what that missing factor is. Scientists will need months to pour over the reams of data gathered in this year's campaign before they can hope to have an answer.

Based on what I learned both from various sources and people I spoke to in the region not all reports of looting and crime in the wake of Katrina are false. However, it does appear that the volume of that crime was greatly exaggerated - and it is not like there was never any crime in the region, especially if one were to consider NOLA itself. Furthermore, let's not forget that a lot of those called looters did exactly the right thing, in my opinion - they broke into stores and warehouses to get the supplies they needed to survive, helping themselves and others.